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awoke from falling asleep

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Woke at two this morning with a headache and went to lie on the sofa with a stomach full of pills.

As I started to drift off, I was unusually conscious of the process. I could feel consciousness slipping away in increments, regularly like an elevator passing down through levels as I lay on the floor with a leg up on the low sofa. All the while, the migraine lights danced in the shapes of numbers and letters and little icons (I recall a skull grinning at me); I'd never seen recognizable symbols in a migraine aura before, and thought that unusual indeed. As was the fact that I suddenly felt no pain.

Then I awoke, lying properly on the sofa, not the floor. And there was no migraine aura but the pain was still there. It had all been a dream.

I've never known whether this sort of random brain seizure was the result of the migraine or the drugs but it's almost always fresh, whatever it is.